Soooo, I woke up at 6:30 this morning, got my tools, spare tubes, camelback, jumper, water and food all packed. double checked the brakes on my bike and the bike my friend was borrowing and relubed the chain on both. Packed it all in my car and headed to Parramatta station. Caught the train to wentworth falls at ten to 9...
The train trip was fun with my mate:
on the way up we were reading through our 'the fat hippys' guide to the anderson trail and the oakes trail... total of about 70kms... getting pretty excited.
so we got there about 10:45....
We left the station, crossed the road got our bearings and went to cross a the next road when suddenly SNAP!!!! followed by a loud #(AT)%!!(AT)#$$#(AT)%$#(AT)(AT)!!!!
coming off the curb my derraileur snapped clean off!!!!
Another 3hours travel back to sydney and straight to my lbs. the guy said this part is designed to snap rather than snapping the derraileur itself and they fixed it on the spot. Ended up buying a saddle bag while I waited and the guy gave me a free halogen headlight (nothing special, just old stock).

With my bike fixed on the spot and ready to go, I was supposed to only go up to the mountains today and do uni work tomorrow. I'm now going up for round 2 and i'll try and get some uni work done today. Hopefully we'll have more luck tomorrow!!!

Shannon

EDITED to prevent anymore smartass comments haha

Last edited by ShanDog on Mon Apr 30, 2007 9:05 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Funnily, we cancelled our debut Oaks trail ride today due to rain.
We're postponing our trip to next week, so let us know how it goes tomorrow and if there are things that we should look out for. I hear the rain makes the trail pretty "unfriendly".

We were considering cancelling but the weather report said the rain was ending by midday and then sunny in the afternoon. By the time we got out there, there was no rain at all. I'll keep you guys posted how tomorrow goes. I'm possibly going back up there next saturday as well. maybe narrowneck that time.

sbra9635 wrote: . . . double checked the breaks on my bike and the bike my friend was borrowing and relubed the chain on both. . . crossed the road got our bearings and went to cross a the next road when suddenly SNAP!!!! followed by a loud #(AT)%!!(AT)#$$#(AT)%$#(AT)(AT)!!!!coming off the curb my derraileur snapped clean off!!!!

sbra9635 wrote: . . . double checked the breaks on my bike and the bike my friend was borrowing and relubed the chain on both. . . crossed the road got our bearings and went to cross a the next road when suddenly SNAP!!!! followed by a loud #(AT)%!!(AT)#$$#(AT)%$#(AT)(AT)!!!!coming off the curb my derraileur snapped clean off!!!!

so its Sunday, Day 2... head on all the way to wentworth falls on the train, met my mate and started heading towards the track. A few kms of following the rd and we decided to check out the aboriginal site, noted on the www.thefathippy.com guide to anderson trail guide, which was down the Inga trail. We got to the site and the closest we found to anything like that was graffiti carved in the rock with things like 'I love cait'. We also saw a geodetic station, [sarcasm] oh wow exciting! [/sarcasm]. The views were incredible though and a great photo opportunity for my mate:
Heading a little bit further and there is a long and fast downhill on the road topping my max speed with 62.1km/h (on a heavy dualie mind you!)
We hit a dirt road and its downhill fun from here on in.

There are small uphills but many long and fun downhills, great speeds and plenty of waterbars to get some air off.. After a while of this I manage to get TWO pinch flats in one go. I think my tyres were probably a bit under pressure so oh well. Then one of the new tubes while pumping, develops a tear in the side of the valve. While squating down to do some pumping my left knee cracks(The same way your knuckle cracks) and hasn't been the same since. It's strange because it hurts when I bend it all the way, but walking, running cycling etc doesn't do anything. Soooo, we're ready to go after 3 spare tubes and about 45mins of this:
We then head off and get some more crazy downhills... incredible fun!!! my friend nearly went over his handlebars hitting the only sandy part of the entire trail:
Shortly after is the craziest part of the whole trail... its a rocky and very steep downhill with huge waterbars for air... The adrenaline was pumping so hard but I'm sure my mate's was worse as he was doing it with our k-mart special hahaha...

When we finally reach the bottom, the fun ends for a while... because there is about 3-4kms of steep uphills and plenty of walking. once reaching the top we stop at the gate at the other end of the trail for a drink:
and a well earned rest
There is a another few kilometres on the road and then we finally reach the woodford train station.

We decided not to do the oakes because of time deadlines and we were pretty exhausted. It's something that I think we're going to do next week!!!

Some of those trails look pretty rough. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the difficulty of these trails (1 - being my baby sister can do it with eyes closed and 10 - being OMGosh!!!! I think I've peed my pants again).

As I told you earlier, my friends and I wre planning to do the woodford trail this weekend. Hopefully the weather stays clear...all I need now is to determine which colour undies to wear LOL

Some of those trails look pretty rough. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the difficulty of these trails (1 - being my baby sister can do it with eyes closed and 10 - being OMGosh!!!! I think I've peed my pants again).

As I told you earlier, my friends and I wre planning to do the woodford trail this weekend. Hopefully the weather stays clear...all I need now is to determine which colour undies to wear LOL

Hmmm... it's hard to say. You're planning on doing the oakes which is supposed to be easier than the Anderson trail which I did. As well as this, my friend was with me who hasn't ridden a bike in nearly 8 years and was on one of our $100 k-mart specials and he did fine. The hardest part for me was walking uphill for 3kms because I'm a rider not a walker These in mind, as long as you have good enough fitness then I would say maybe 5 or 6 for the oakes but it's just a guess without doing it.

The Anderson only had one or two sections that were really rough, a lot of it was smoother because of lots of cars/bikes going through. I think you'll have a great day on the oakes. Should be 28kms of offroad fun!

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